My son's cub scout den recently put together an arcade machine. I only put two games on it for now, Ostrich Riders and Super Tux Kart. I was specifically looking for 2 player simultaneous games. For Ostrich Riders, I added an "arcade mode". In that mode, I remove most of the options for example configuring the controls for the player. I added support for keys '1' and '2' as 1 player and 2 player buttons.

I would be great if Super Tux Kart could have an arcade mode. Make it so you can't enter story mode. Have 1 player and 2 player buttons correspond to single player/multi player modes. Remove the ability to configure the controls. (The way I handle configuring for Ostrich Riders is to configure it outside of arcade mode and then setup EmulationStation to call it with arcade mode argument.) I would still want the quit option so that you could get back to game selection.

I am not a dev, but I would guess they have enough work to do already and not much spare time so they may not have time for this request.

However, this game is open source and well-designed enough that you can clone the source code and remove the menu items which you do not want, then compile that game yourself! This will give you full control over what options appear and which are removed. Since all you want is to remove features instead of adding new ones, I would assume this is quite simple (these look like the files you may wish to modify in your copy: https://github.com/supertuxkart/stk-cod ... ui/screens )

Thanks for the pointer. It's not quite as simple as it seems. If you remove the online button, supertuxkart crashes. However I'm more interested to know if the devs would accept an arcade mode as a permanent option. I was originally thinking it would be a separate stkgui file but the main_menu.stkgui already has some debug entries that are removed when not configured. In arcade mode it could simply remove more entries.

It would be extremely niche, so adding this to the core code as something we'd have to maintain isn't a great idea.

For the crash, I guess it's because you edited the .stkgui file without editing the corresponding .cpp/hpp screen files which expect various widgets to be present in the .stkgui file. Edit both appropriately and it should work.

It is rather niche but an arcade machine can be a great introduction. I plan to bring it to a local STEM event and a town celebration.

If I submitted a patch that prevented crashing when menu items were removed would that be accepted. I might be willing to modify the stkgui file on the machine but maintaining a source tree to remove menu items is not practical.

QwertyChouskie {l Wrote}:setVisible(false); // make not visiblesetActive(false); // make not selectable

But this requires code changes again. Unless there is some way to do it in the xml.

Code changes are required to do what you want to do. They are rather simple, but there is no way around them. They are also simpler than changing the code to be able to support both normal mode (which would be used by almost all players) and an arcade mode used very rarely.

I'm not planning on maintaining my own code changes. I don't want to have to grab latest and rebuild every once in a while. I'd rather just get updates from the distribution. I would be willing to fix the code to handle the online button being removed if devs are willing to accept it. Otherwise I may just remove the configuration button so people can't mess with the controls.

EDIT: Great arcade. The cub scout one is a little more plain. I'll post a pic when I can.